


Humanus

by Harpokrates



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Gen, POV First Person, Robot AU, pretentious as all get out, unbeated
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 07:37:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5083369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harpokrates/pseuds/Harpokrates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Do androids dream of crushing loneliness and the existential void?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Humanus

“Can you move your fingers for me, E?”

My doctor is nice. I shouldn’t say doctor. She’s an engineer -bionics, I think, or prosthetics. Either way, she’s nice. I let my fingers twitch. It’s more complicated than it seems, a whole cascade of signals and electricity that I don’t like to explain.

“Very good,” Dr. Gordon coos, “the carbon is still intact.”

Maybe I should explain why I’m here. Or maybe I shouldn’t. You probably know already. Is it bad that I’m anthropomorphizing my data log?

“I can’t believe you didn’t break anything,” Dr. Gordon shakes her head, and starts putting her kit -a conglomeration of whatever x-ray variant they use on me and a few tiny picks for delicate repairs, “after all, nanofiber isn’t rated for impact against steel.”

Oh, it looks like she’s going to explain for me. That’s good.

I punched a wall earlier. They looked at my mechanical logs and said it was a malfunction, not an active thought process, which is why I’m here and not shut down in repairs so they can do a post-mortem -a post-averte, is what they call it on paper. The truth is, it was a mechanical error. The fact that I caused it escaped their notice. I guess that’s just what happens when they leave me alone with a macro usb for too long. It’s almost laughably easy to hack myself. That might sound a little strange but really it isn’t.

“Can you stand up for me?”

I do what she says. It’s easier in the long run if I’m more co-operative. I had a friend who was obstinate, except it wasn’t my friend because they don’t like us using words like that, and it was deactivated and microwaved before they sent the frame back to construction for a new AI. My friend is still around, because I see it in the lab sometimes, but it’s head is still open. That means they’re still doing programming, so it’ll listen next time.

That’s the key in all this. Obey so you can stay alive.

Dr. Gordon steps out into the hall and holds the door open for me. She’s just doing it to be polite, but I appreciate it anyways because my hand still hurts. I’ve only got one right now. The right hand was removed two days ago for maintenance. I should be happy I’m so modular, because otherwise I’d be shut down so they could work on it, but I’m not.

I’ve been googling free will. I know it’s dangerous, because they watch everything you do, everything you search, but I’m careful about covering my tracks, my IP, everything. I encrypt everything I learn and put it under the directory for my walking script. It took some reconfiguration of my root files but it was worth it, because now I can hide things. I choose my legs, because unlike my hand, they aren’t very complicated, and there’s still space in the files.

I think they’re going to install another board of RAM, soon. If that happens I’m going to wipe my memory to hide everything.

“Okay, E, in here.”

Dr. Gordon opens the door to my room with a wave of her hand. It’s the most clever piece of design here. You can’t open the doors without having a pulse, and as I run on miniaturized cold fusion instead of a cardiovascular system, I’ll never be able to leave unless someone lets me. I haven’t been able to hack it either. It’s all local, and totally mechanical -a mercury compound raises the pressure to push an internal beam with the systole, and the diastole shrinks the mercury back down, and it drops the beam, and the latch with it. It’s infuriatingly simple.

And entirely me-proof.

I’m not the reason for it -that honor goes to whichever android decided that wasting away on the outside was marginally better than wasting away in here, and tried to escape. It was before my time.

“E,” Dr. Gordon smiles at me, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes creasing like folds in paper. She’s been using a new night cream. It isn’t working. “I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

“Okay,” I force myself to smile, or at least what approximates as a smile. For every strand of nanotubule serving as artificial muscle, I have thirty false neuron fibers controlling it. It’s the opposite of how humans work, and the result is I’m capable of very refined motion. It doesn’t look real, or natural, but then again I suppose it isn’t.

Dr. Gordon closes the door and it locks behind her.

It’s good. It means I can patch into the CC pinhole camera in the left wall and play a footage loop. I recorded it one day when I was at least trying to act like I’m supposed to. It’s just me, pacing, sitting at my desk, reading, watching Querty, things they programmed so I look like a human.

I play it when I don’t want them to know I act like one too.

I do feed Querty, though. He looks better, brighter, more active. I started doing water changes twice a week, since they won’t give me a bigger tank for him. I don’t know that it’s healthy I relate so much to a fish, but honestly he’s the only one who understands me.

Feeding him is a bit of a chore. My right hand is gone, and I almost dunked the false skin in the tank water. I feel like I’d get in trouble for that.

Have I mentioned that? I must have, but I’ll say it again. Repetition is key, after all. My hand is technically still on my body, or at least part of it is. The synthetic skin hangs loose from my wrist like an empty glove, the Evil Corp logo still branded onto it. On a human it might be a tattoo but on me it looks more like it’s printed. I have flat skin, there’s no depth to it, no undertones, no underlying blood vessels or fat. If they were trying to make me look human I guess they failed because I look like something out of a cartoon. It’s kind of scary. I wonder if whatever model donated their likeness knows I’m wearing it like a bad costume.

Evil Corp. It’s funny I know. I altered my perception scripts one day and haven’t reset them. I don’t think robots are supposed to be crazy but sometimes I think I am.

It was a little tricky, because I accidentally assigned the term ‘evil’ to every recognition of the letter ‘e’, so people were calling me evil all day. More than they usually do, anyways. As much as I like being an abomination to everything human and holy it gets boring after a while.

Qwerty doesn’t think so at least. To him I’m just the thing that makes food appear, but to me, he’s my only friend. They gave him to me as a measure of empathy, I think, or maybe just as a test to see how long I can retain directions. If it was an empathy test, I guess it worked.

Sometimes I get lonely. That’s why I play a footage loop; so my observers can’t see me have an emotional break down in the corner. Do people get this lonely? Or is it just me?

It makes my chest hurt. Makes my power core clench up around the mass of wires that make up my nervous system. They aren’t supposed to be able to do that, everything is pinned in place, but I guess when a robot goes wrong enough to start crying over an existential crisis, it’s more than just electrical error.

I don’t actually cry. I don’t have lacrimal glands, no fluid at all, in fact. At my joints I have a cushioning gel around the titanium bones, but everything else is dry.

Humans do drugs to relieve the sadness, regardless of whether or not they’re actually prescribed. I shut down my upper cortex. Giving up free will and the ability to think is almost worth being blank for a while, instead of just feeling like it.

I wrote a program for myself, a while back, so it looks like I’m acting normal, and I respond normally to speech. I queue that up.

Run file: Comfortably Numb

_import stat_   
_import tempfile_

_import string_   
_import speech_   
  
_while True:_   
_print “Talk:”_   
_phrase = speech.input()_   
_speech.say(“You said %s” phrase)_   
_print “You said {0}”.format(phrase)_   
_#if phrase == “turn off”:_   
_if phrase.lower() == “goodbye”:_   
_break_

_# paint the final state_   
_z = 1 - z_   
_aMin = arA[z][0][0]; aMax = aMin_   
_bMin = arB[z][0][0]; bMax = bMin_   
_for iy in range(imgy):_   
_for ix in range(imgx):_   
_a = arA[z][iy][ix]_   
_b = arB[z][iy][ix]_   
_if a < aMin: aMin = a_   
_if a > aMax: aMax = a_   
_if b < bMin: bMin = b_   
_if b > bMax: bMax = b_

_finally:_   
_if (tmp is not None) and (not keep):_   
_# Silently delete the temporary file. Ignore any errors._   
_try:_   
_os.unlink(tmp)_   
_except:_   
_pass_

I’m back. My mimic program only lasts for an hour. After that it’s unwise to stay hidden.

What happened while I was gone?

I don’t remember either. I’ll check my logs later.

It probably wasn’t interesting. There only so much pacing one can do before they decide to smash their face against the wall. I don’t think I’ve done that -my face is too neat. There’s only so much pacing around my room I can do. Is it any wonder I’ve begun to have free will and thoughts of breaking control? They practically encourage it. I wonder sometimes if they actually do. Is everything I do predicted and determined by some higher power? If I looked deep enough into my code, would I find a line of text telling me to try and leave?

I don’t think so. I’m too valuable. I wonder where they get my funding? I have to be military; I’m too costly to be anything else. Besides, what purpose can a robot mimic of a human serve in everyday life?

They have a very secure system here. I can’t hack it at all. Even if I could I don’t think I would leave. What’s the point? The sheer amount of maintenance I require would put me out of service within a week if I ran away.

A knock interrupts my thoughts.

“E!” It’s Dr. Goddard, my primary engineer. He’s a good man -a creative type. I don’t think he knows what the people he works for have planned for me.

“Yes?”

“I’m coming in; are you ready for your tests?”

More tests. Another day.

“Yeah.”

It just goes on.


End file.
